2022 summary & happy new year!
Hey đ, it's Phuc & this is indie hacking report of 2022. Reveal my product & plan for 2023. Happy new year to y'all!
Summary of 2022
2022 is the first year I went indie hacking full-time and it was a fantastic year!
Built 6 products in 12 months
In short, Iâve completed my goals & met so many awesome indie hackers on Twitter and in-person as I started traveling again at the same time, too.
At the beginning of the year, I worked 9-5 as a lead software engineer at Fig & make $$$ while living in Vietnam. It was a dream job but I no longer had desire to trade my time for more money, I wanted to work on something of my own. In April, I quit my job and went on indie hacking full-time after saving enough runway.
With 3-year runway, my 1st year of indie hacking was planned to launch 6 products in 12 months and to make $12,000 from these products.
May: Launched Queue (#1)
June: Launched Nora (#2)
July: Launched nbundle (#3)
September: Launched Daily (#4) & Clean Mac Desktop (#5)
October: Hit 10,000 followers on Twitter and was a bit burnout, then I shared an incomplete product Animatable (#6)
November: Sold Queue, completed my challenge of 6 products in 12 months, & tripled my revenue goal. All happened in 7 months (5 months earlier than expected).
Went nomad & met cool folks
Apart from building & launching products, this year I also traveled again & met a lot of inspiring & interesting folks, we became friends & I learned a ton from them (I hope so did they). These moments were highlights of the year!
Slow last month of the year
With my goals having been completed and the holiday vibes going on everywhere, December was a very slow month for me (again after November đ«).
I continued on building my new B2B product that I mentioned in the last 2 issues and I canât say Iâm happy with the progress. It has been going on for too long that I feel annoyed now. Part of the reason was that the month was packed with travel & celebrations but I canât keep using that excuse.
On the good side, I went back & saw my parents, old friends & teachers as well as a few Viet indie hackers after a year, it was very fun!
I want to build more in 2023
Despite hitting my goals early in 2022, I think I can & should still build more & faster. The below Github contribution chart would agree with me:
Iâm nowhere near my full capacity. I feel guilty looking at this in comparison to my favorite makersâ. I know building more doesnât always mean success but seeing Tonyâs & Noahâs, I want to build more. Coding is a big part of my identity & I enjoy doing it, the stats should say the same!
My goals for 2023
After hitting âfairly comfortableâ goals in 2022, this year I want to push myself a bit harder, I have 2 specific goals:
Launch 1-3 products.
Grow them to a combination of $20,000 MRR.
I know $20,000 MRR is an insane goal but I want to see how hard I can push myself & how far I can go when I set uncomfortable expectation.
The 1st goal is to back myself up to avoid burning out & feeling like a total failure if I canât hit $20,000 MRR. Launching products is within my control, but this time I want to stay below 3 products, I need to spend more time focusing on growth this year.
Revealing my new product
I planned to reveal this product together with its first version but it has been going on for too long, so to say thankyou for your patience, Iâm sharing a bit about it đ:
Itâs a CMS for statically-generated sites, focusing specifically on Markdown-based sites like Hugo, Next.js, Docusaurus, Gatsby, Nuxt, Vuepress, etc. Itâs a Notion-like editor that connects directly to your existing Github repository & makes editing easier for you and/or your teammates.
A few key problems that it solves:
Editing static sites requires cloning repository, opening in code editor, and creating a commit to publish changes. This process is unnecessary. For non-technical members, it is the worst part of their days.
Uploading media is tedious. Writers need to download images, resize & put them in the repository, then reference them manually.
No way to manage content types & constraints, everyone can edit everything freely, which can cause bugs & mistakes when writing, especially for non-technical members. Reviewing requires developers.
The planned business model is to make it free for personal uses & charge for team uses only:
Help individuals to edit content on their static sites easier & faster for free forever
Help businesses who start writing more content & having a team of editors to streamline their content flow without making any changes to their sites or implementation.
If you find the idea interesting or have any feedback, feel free to reply or send me an email, Iâll put you on the waitlist (I have only a handful of people on the list now).
Thatâs it for now. Wish yâall a great start of 2023 and best of luck with your projects & goals in the new year!
Great email Phuc! Very inspiring to read.
Very cool to read and follow your journey. Good luck on the amazing 20k MRR goal đâš